New Year’s. A friend asked all of us what we hoped for in the year to come.

“I want to not fuck up,” I said. Felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, realized these people had never seen me cry, which feels so weird, because I have always been used to absolutely everyone who comes into contact with me at all seeing me cry at one point or another. But although the people present were close friends of mine, they have only been so for less than a year and a half. During most of that time, I have been the New, Improved Polly on medication that actually works for me.

Did not want them to see me cry now. Had to explain that I wasn’t really being upset and maudlin, that I was actually trying to be positive.

“It’s just that I went all through 2007 without fucking up,” I said. “I was sick for so long, and the past year was the first year that I’ve been well. I just want things to stay that way.”

I then almost immediately proceeded to come dangerously close to fucking up.

I spent the next few weeks hypomanic in a bad way. Yelled at people for no reason. Obsessed endlessly about certain things. You don’t even want to hear about my sex drive during those weeks (hint: really, really high). Drank way too much, alone. Spent too much money.

With little warning and absolutely no fanfare, I slipped into a mild depression and stayed there for a few more weeks. Believed I would never be happy again. Wondered what was the point of anything. Continued to occasionally drink too much, alone. Had to try very hard to keep from cutting myself. Sent disturbing emails to friends about wanting to cut myself. Only managed not to cut myself because I knew my two-year anniversary of not cutting would be coming up soon, and I really wanted to make it to two years without screwing up.

Then woke up one morning and felt better, just like that. Not caused by anything. Nothing had changed except for my mood. The weather was still utter wintery crap, but it suddenly wasn’t bringing me down anymore. (Seriously, if you are not in Canada right now, stay away from this country until at least May. I am not joking.) I still had the same slight personal problems I’d had for a while, but I was suddenly able to look at them rationally and not blow things out of proportion. It’s so weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are well. It’s also weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are unwell, but I don’t like that one quite as much. I can’t help but think of it as some cosmic dude or dudette mucking about with a remote that controls my emotions.

I had been seriously considering asking my doctor about increasing my medication when I saw her, but ultimately I didn’t, since I wasn’t having problems functioning and my mood swings were quite tame compared to the way they used to be a year and a half ago. I figured I could deal with it without more drugs, but afterward I worried that maybe it was stupid and pigheaded of me.

Now that I feel better, though, I’m pleased to see that this was indeed the best decision for me at this time. I’m glad I got through that rough patch while remaining on only a minimal amount of medication.

One in six teens inflict self-harm (TRIGGER WARNING: if you don’t want to see a photo of cuts on someone’s forearm, then don’t click this link), the Globe and Mail tells us today, and the sub-headline of that article is “Abusing yourself isn’t a suicidal or attention-seeking action, research suggests, but a coping mechanism.”

Well, duh. We’ve been trying to tell people that for years and years¹, but who bothers listening to self-injurers? Especially to teen self-injurers. We are not doing it to get attention.

The research, published in today’s edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, shows that 17.6 per cent of teenagers self-harm - a number that includes 21 per cent of girls and 8.7 per cent of boys.

This being the media, though, they have to warp the contents of the actual study, Nonsuicidal self-harm in youth: a population-based survey, so that “Ninety-six of 568 (16.9%) youth indicated that they had ever harmed themselves” from the original journal article, somehow becomes “17.6 per cent of teenagers self-harm” — present tense, plus an inexplicable 0.7 bonus. (Admittedly, I haven’t read the whole study yet because I was having computer problems earlier today and I am lazy, but I shall get around to it, and if there is an explanation that I missed for that extra 0.7, then sorry, my bad.) I suppose it’s mainly a case of people wanting shocking headlines, as the Globe and Mail article does continue as follows:

A total of 568 young people aged 14 to 21 were interviewed. Ninety-six of them said they had, at some point in their young lives, harmed themselves deliberately.

About one-third of the teenagers had done so only once, another third on two to three occasions and the other third had self-harmed repeatedly. On average, their mutilating actions began at age 15.

Much of the article is an interview with the study’s lead author, Dr. Mary Nixon, and it’s pretty good except for one comment that directly contradicts other things in the article:

“We’re trying to raise awareness that it’s not uncommon in young people and not related to mental health problems,” she said.

“It” being self-injury, of course. It’s such a weird quote that I’ve got to wonder if it’s a typo or a misunderstanding or something. I don’t think SI is always related to mental health problems, but I think it is the majority of the time.

The research shows a clear link between self-harm and mental health problems. Those who hurt themselves are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and impulse disorders.

It is not entirely clear why girls are more likely to self-harm than boys, but Dr. Nixon believes it is related to the fact that rates of depression soar at puberty and that girls not only mature earlier but react differently to stress.

See? Does not compute. SI is indeed related to mental health, although it’s very rarely suicidal or attention-seeking. (Never say never. All generalizations are bad. Tee hee.)

Dr. Nixon, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said when teenagers harm themselves, it is often assumed they are doing so to get attention, but the behaviour is far more complex.

“A lot of these kids hide their cuts and burns. It’s not attention-seeking, it’s something else,” she said.

THANK YOU. I really appreciate somebody saying this and it being national news.

¹Although we don’t phrase it that way, because then it would sound like we were talking about masturbation.

It was a shock to hear the other day that Heath Ledger had died, seemingly due to an accidental or intentional overdose of pills. He was a talented actor, appeared to be a genuinely nice person, according to what his friends and neighbours said about him, and he had a two-year-old daughter he loved very much. I am also crass enough to mention that he was hot, although his death wouldn’t have been any less upsetting if he hadn’t been attractive.

It’s strange that when someone dies and nobody knows whether it’s suicide or an accident, most people’s immediate response is, I sure hope it wasn’t suicide. I’m not sure it’s any less sad if someone who definitely doesn’t want to die suddenly winds up dead. It’s easy enough to think of reasons behind this knee-jerk reaction, though, and here are a few:

• Suicide is considered a major taboo.
• It’s very uncomfortable to think of someone who is suffering and unhappy before they die, and more pleasant to think of them as having had a pleasant and rosy life up until their death.
• People feel that it’s something someone should have seen coming and been able to stop, unlike a freak accident that might have been less easy to predict.
• In a case like this, where it’s somebody who Had It All, you know that this guy had talent, money, fame, good looks, and a child he cared about, and still might have been depressed enough to purposely end his life, and you wonder what the hell kind of chance any of the rest of us have of being okay.

Anyway, suicide or accident, it’s still a tragedy.

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher is one of my favourite books. It’s probably my favourite memoir of all time. My eating disorder has never been that serious, but I can relate to the author eerily well. It was often as if I was reading about what was going on inside my own head, only expressed much more eloquently than I could hope to do so myself. I’m a good writer, not that it’s evident on this blog… but Marya Hornbacher is an amazing writer, and I am in awe of her. The book is an honest an insightful portrayal of illness, although I wish she had written about her actual recovery. Even more than that, I’ve often wished that someone would write a book about manic depression that was just like Wasted.

So I was pretty excited when I was reading the People article about “Britney’s mental illness” (no, I’m not even going to go there right now) and there was a sidebar about Hornbacher’s upcoming memoir, Madness: A Bipolar Life. There are some very annoying annoying things in the book description, but at least I know Hornbacher didn’t write the jacket copy herself:

At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is.

Ugh. Yeah, I’m also rapid-cycling bipolar I, and so what? Do not brag about how your manic depression’s penis is bigger than other people’s, okay? This is not something where you can just whip out a tape measure and settle the matter once and for all, and even if you could, it would be pointless. There are sucktastic things about all flavours of bipolar disorder, and mental illness one-upmanship is really tacky and helps nobody.

Also, Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change the current debate on whether bipolar in children exists.

This is another one of those don’t-even-go-there things that is probably unfair of me to comment on until I’ve read the actual book.

I can’t say I like the title much, either, but I’m still dying to read the book. Probably there will be parts that will annoy me, and there will be parts that I love, like this passage from Wasted:

People who’ve Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I’m touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself.

Or this part, where she falls down and is too weak from starvation to get up:

Halfway home I began to run, a faltering, stumbling run, eyelashes fluttering with snowflakes, face numb, hair falling into my face with the weight of wet snow. I slipped and fell and could not get up. I sat there in a heap in front of the vice president’s mansion. I, up-and-coming young journalist, A student, maniac, starving artist, invisible basket case, me. I cried with an impotent fury at my legs for refusing to stand when I told them to and thought of my cousin Brian as my hands, pure white, indiscernible in the white snow, scrabbled about trying to collect the contents of my bags which had spilled. I thought of my brilliant and wonderful cousin, dear friend and lifelong confidant, who’d been in a wheelchair since he was small. I thought of how he must feel every day, legs refusing to work, through no fault of his own, through some miserable joke of God, and I thought: This is your own fucking fault. Get up. GET UP. I hated myself with a pure and fierce energy and I wished myself dead.

I don’t hate myself anymore. It’s been a long time since I did. But that excerpt says everything you need to know about the way I felt back when I did hate myself.

Lately I am trying very hard not to do inappropriate things or to overshare, which is why I haven’t been posting. The Internet is not a good place for oversharing. Hello, world, here are all the stupid things that are going on in my head lately, all the stupid things I am trying so hard not to say and do. Nope, not gonna happen.

My current state of mind is the result of recent personal issues. They might not be the sole cause of it, but they’re definitely the main cause. I am trying to deal with these issues in a healthy way, instead of drinking too much, not sleeping enough, spending too much money, and sending people inappropriate emails. So far, I am only being mildly successful at this, but I’m trying.

Surprisingly, nothing horrible happened over the holidays. A “Christmas miracle,” if you will. I’d been afraid that my brother would do something dumb, because he’d been saying all along that he was going to call his ex-girlfriend on Boxing Day and it never goes well when he calls her, but he didn’t call. Whew.

He’s on Seroquel. He’s gained forty pounds and he’s tired all the time.

“It can’t be making him tired all day, though,” my mother said to me. “His psychiatrist said that if he took the Seroquel around ten at night, he shouldn’t be tired anymore by the time he gets up in the morning.”

Maybe it was wrong of me to laugh at her, but I couldn’t help it. I have told her twelve million times that antipsychotics can make you very, very tired. This psychiatrist is someone who I kind of know (I know his family), so I’d thought he wouldn’t be dumb and he wouldn’t act like a jerk. But here he is, saying that the side effects that one of his patients is experiencing from a drug do not exist.

I had more faith in this guy than that. This is disappointing. It makes me want to scream. My brother is possibly the least motivated person in the world — I can’t see how antipsychotics are supposed to change that for the better.

Oh, yeah. They’re not.

I’m going to visit my family for a few days over the holidays, and this year I’m even more worried than usual about it, because my brother is completely unwilling and/or unable to consider anybody else’s feelings, ever. He wasn’t always like this. I can’t picture visiting for a few days without him marring it by, at best, starting arguments and running off. I don’t even want to think about any of the worst-case scenarios. Maybe I’ll be lucky and nothing too bad will happen, just the normal petty squabbles that everybody’s family has. You never know. It could happen.

Via Liz Spikol, I came across this article: Lawyer defends firm’s decision to dismiss worker with bipolar disorder.

Stephen Bird, who represents ADGA Group Consulting Inc., said the company discussed employee Paul Lane’s condition with him after he revealed that he had bipolar disorder and researched the condition on the internet before making the decision to dismiss him.

According to the written human rights tribunal ruling, what managers learned convinced them that Lane, who was hired to test artillery software for a Department of National Defence contract, would not be able to meet the rigours of a stressful job with tight deadlines.

Ooh, tight deadlines! Sooo scary! Look, some people can handle tight deadlines and some people can’t. Having bipolar disorder does not necessarily mean that you can’t.

Liz says, “are you kidding?” re: the company researching bipolar disorder on the Internet and whatever they learned there apparently being a deciding factor in the decision to fire Lane. Which I totally have to agree with when you consider these paragraphs from the article:

Not only does the company believe the tribunal erred in its decision, but Bird alleges that it also over-stepped its jurisdiction in the way it handled evidence in the case.

For example, the tribunal heard from experts on bipolar disorder who didn’t even know Lane, he argued during the case.

“The evidence should either not have been accepted at all, or should have been accepted for very limited purposes,” he said.

Okay, so ADGA looking up stuff on the Internet about bipolar disorder in general, presumably all written by people who didn’t know Lane, and not liking what they found is an okay reason to fire the guy, but when subject experts who also don’t know Lane have their say about bipolar disorder, that shouldn’t be allowed?

On the basis of that article and a previous article about Lane, it would seem that he hadn’t actually had any problems at that particular job; the company just assumed he couldn’t handle it based on what he told them about his illness and whatever the hell they read on the Web about it.

According to the facts presented in the ruling, Lane was dismissed in October 2001, eight days after he started work as a senior test analyst as ADGA. He had told his supervisor that he had bipolar disorder and his behaviour should be monitored.

I am lucky that I’ve always been able to do my work without any special accommodations whatsoever. It wasn’t the case with schoolwork, but it’s been the case with work-work. (Wow, what a mature phrase… “work-work”… clearly someone of my maturity level should have no problem handling a career!) Thus, there’s never been any reason for me to disclose my manic depression to any employers I have had.

The company denied that it discriminated against Lane on the basis of his disability. It alleged he was dismissed because he was not capable of performing the essential functions of the job for which he had been hired. It also said he had lied about the amount of sick time he had taken during a previous job that would have alerted the company to his illness.

However, tribunal adjudicator David J. Mullan found the company did not, as required, make a significant effort to accommodate Lane or properly assess the situation to determine whether it could accommodate Lane’s disability without “undue hardship.”

Lane was hospitalized almost immediately after being fired. I know being fired due to discrimination is a lot more stressful than merely having tight deadlines, but I’ve got to say that I’m pretty sure that if I were fired tomorrow, I couldn’t see myself winding up being hospitalized because of it. It’s really easy to say what you’d do in a given situation when you’re not actually in that situation, so maybe I’m being way too harsh here. Or maybe he actually isn’t a guy who can handle a lot of stress, but still: you should actually give someone a chance to see what they can do before you fire them, and if they have a disability, you do have to take appropriate steps to see if it can be accommodated without undue hardship. Lane didn’t think he’d need much in the way of accommodations.

I know I’m getting just south of coherence here, but mainly I’m frustrated at not knowing nearly enough of the particulars of this case and realizing that it’s my own damn fault that I don’t know. I’ll read the actual tribunal report after the holidays. I don’t have time now.

Interesting post at Furious Seasons recently (heh, as if there were not an interesting post there nearly every day!) regarding manic depression as a dangerous gift, as a personality disorder, and as something from which one can completely recover.

I know I am going out on a limb here that someone will likely chop off for me, but I believe that much of what we call bipolar disorder is in fact a personality disorder or constellation of behavioral issues.

I’m not looking to chop off this limb. I view manic depression as a dangerous gift as well, and as something that maybe at least some people can completely recover from. I also understand that Philip is not saying all a person with bipolar disorder has to do to recover is pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

I think bipolar disorder can be a personality disorder–and, nitpickers be warned, I am using the term very broadly–more often than it is a mental illness.

Depression–and here I am not discussing major or clinical depression–is widely known as having a huge personality component.

Mania itself–and here I mean the bad old wild delusions, hallucinations and declarations of Godhead mania–is not a personality disorder. When it’s in full flower, mania is straight-up insanity.

Dysphoric mania is possibly the least fun thing in the world, but there is at least one good thing about it: once you’ve recovered from an episode of psychotic dysphoric mania, it’s really hard to convince yourself that it was a character flaw. You can easily convince yourself that you weren’t depressed, just stupid and lazy, and that you weren’t hypomanic, you were just being a silly, reckless whore… but after having auditory hallucinations for a few weeks straight, once I finally stopped, I realized that something had been really wrong and that this time it wasn’t my fault.

I was aware that most of the time, medication either made me a zombie or made my moods even worse. So sometimes I would stop taking medication, be fine for a few months, and then be much, much worse than before. I learned to do things that sometimes stopped mood episodes, but more often just allowed me to cope with the symptoms I experienced, so that I functioned very well as one of the walking wounded. For quite a long time, I honestly believed that there was no such thing as getting better, there was only becoming a better liar, so that you could hide your pain from others and even from yourself. Or at least I thought that was the only option for me, because I’d read about other people who were asymptomatic for long periods of time, who claimed to experience “growth” and “healing.” I didn’t disbelieve them, but I didn’t think that anything would work for me. I tried CBT, DBT skills, family therapy, couples therapy, group therapy, exercise, meditation, hospitalization, acupuncture, journalling, medication, medication, medication, and other stuff… but the hits just kept coming. I kept getting depressed, I kept getting hypomanic, and I kept getting manic.

Some of those things helped. Some didn’t. (Acupuncture, for instance, was supposed to make me less stressed, but instead it turned me into a stressed person with needles in her ears.) For nearly a decade, though, none of them prevented me from having mood episodes, which I dealt with using a combined method of actual coping skills plus being way, way too hard on myself. I have been essentially non-syndromal for the past year, though, and it seems to be solely because I’m finally on medication that’s working for me.

I am better, and I want this to be an accomplishment. I wish this were something I could take credit for. But it’s not.

The journey to get to this point was so long and arduous that I want the current solution to be complex. (I say “current solution” because although this has been the solution for the past year, I don’t assume it will be the solution that works best for me forever.) It’s not complex, though. It’s not intricate. I-take-two-pills-a-day-and-now-I-am-well. If I am experiencing any side effects, I am not aware of them. I still have emotions. I can cry when really bad things happen, I can take joy in something as simple as seeing furry gray squirrels race across tree branches, and I can write really bad fiction.

Despite how hard I tried to get better, I still can’t take any responsibility for it. It’s true that I learned plenty of things along the way, including just how vast the extent of my own ignorance is (and how ignorant many of my doctors were), but nothing I learned was instrumental in my actual recovery. I tried and tried and tried to save myself, yet I did not.

I wish I’d fixed it. I know I should be careful what I wish for. I’ll say that I wish I’d slain the dragon myself and the next thing you know, the meds will poop out and the dragon will pop back up, all scaly and fire-breathing, saying, “You called? Here I am, bitch. Come and get me.”

But still. I wish I’d fixed it.

I just spent over two fucking hours writing a post about Howard Hyde, a man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who died in a jail in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia thirty hours after he was Tasered by police, when Wordpress ATE IT. Or my computer ate it, or something ate it. It just disappeared while I was working on, I swear, the last sentence of it. It should have been autosaved, of course, but somehow it’s still gone.

How about you read a couple of news articles while I curl up in the corner of the room and cuss at technology in general for a while?

• Police informed of tasered man’s psychiatric illness - widow
• N.S. orders Taser review after inmate’s death: Halifax police reluctant to link 45-year-old man’s death to weapon
• Man jolted with Taser needed help, widow says: ‘I really don’t want this to happen to anyone else’
• Panel urged to include mentally ill person: Taser review report will be examined by experts: province

My original post had actual opinions! And more links! And quotes from articles! But I’m not going to bother trying to reconstruct it, because that would just annoy me.

I’ve also been working on a more personal post on an entirely different subject, but it’s been difficult to write because it’s painful for me. Luckily, the draft of that one is still intact. Don’t expect it to be an insightful work of art when it’s finished just because it’s taking me so long. It’s hard enough for me to write it; it would be impossible for me to write it well.

Here’s another one for the “What the Hell Is WRONG With People?” file. I’m not sure there’s much point in linking to this entire article, since it’s from the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, and Canadaeast.com doesn’t seem to keep archived newspaper articles online for a very long time, but here you go. It’s about a New Brunswick teenager who committed suicide in an Ontario prison.

Mentally ill Moncton teenager Ashley Smith, whose death in a segregation cell in an Ontario prison a month ago has sparked several investigations, was often kept in restraints with her cuffed hands chained to a body belt that was attached by another chain to her shackled ankles, Canadaeast News Service has learned.

“We are well aware that these restraints were quite often used in the staff interventions with Ashley Smith,” said Kim Pate, a specialist in prison law and advocate for female offenders.

The restraints may have violated Smith’s human rights and raise questions about why she was in a prison at all, said Pate, national director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

“I can’t imagine a scenario where it wouldn’t violate her human rights, and even if the correctional service perceived it as lawful in order to protect her from self-harm, if they felt the need to use it in segregation, she should have been sent for a full psychiatric assessment,” said Pate, who knew Smith and last saw her alive less than a month before her apparent suicide Oct. 19 in the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont.

Ashley Smith committed suicide by asphyxiation in her cell. Several prison staff members are facing charges of criminal negligence causing death, others are being suspended without pay, a new warden has been appointed, and a number of official investigations are being conducted, but it’s all too late for Ashley.

Smith’s odyssey through the prison system began when she went to the Miramichi Youth Detention Centre as a 15-year-old who had thrown apples at a postal worker. The offences that led to an accumulated six-year, one-month sentence were nearly all committed while she was incarcerated, says Pate, who is speaking publicly on behalf of Smith’s parents. Smith’s convictions were for assaulting a peace officer, falsely reporting a fire, uttering threats, theft and assault.

Yes, you read that right. This kid first went to jail for throwing apples at someone. And then it seems that she just didn’t get out. Almost all of her offences were committed while she was in jail, and her sentence just got longer. I can’t say that nobody tried to rehabilitate her, but I can say that it obviously didn’t work. They must have given up on the rehabilitation idea eventually, though, since soon Ashley Smith was spending up to 23 hours a day in segregation.

From an article in the Globe and Mail:

At the time of her death, Ms. Smith was on suicide watch, which called for her to be under constant surveillance, both by prison guards and by a set of video cameras. Her psychological breakdown was not a surprise: For nearly two years, Ms. Smith had been confined to segregation cells, where she lived alone, in conditions that appalled the few outsiders who knew about them.

“Her human rights and her Charter rights were violated,” said Kim Pate… “She was being treated in ways that were inhumane.”

Ms. Smith spent time in several institutions. One of them was in Saskatchewan; a male guard there was later charged with assaulting her. Ms. Pate visited Ms. Smith several times, and complained to prison officials, apparently to no avail. The last visit was on Sept. 24, when Ms. Pate saw Ms. Smith in a bare concrete cell at Grand Valley. Ms. Smith had no shoes, and her only clothing was a security gown, a prison garment that looked like a horse blanket. Ms. Smith’s mattress had been taken away, forcing her to sleep on a concrete slab. There was no blanket.

In Ms. Pate’s view, Ms. Smith was spiralling downward, trapped in a cycle of self-defeating rage against the institution, which reacted with punishments and deprivations.

“She was cold, and she was quite distressed,” Ms. Pate said. “She had been that way for several days when I saw her. Anyone being treated in that way, if they did not have mental-health issues, certainly would have developed them.”

After a suicide in the prison in 2004, an inquest was conducted and recommendations were made to prevent further suicides from occurring. A couple of these recommendations were followed. Others weren’t. A team of British prison inspectors also advised the prison to stop shackling women in leg irons, and this recommendation wasn’t followed, either.

From the Telegraph-Journal article:

CTV News, citing unnamed sources, reported last week that guards had watched her place a ligature around her neck but did not intervene immediately, believing she was not seriously harming herself.

“Rather than receiving treatment, this mentally unstable teenager spent most of her sentence in segregation,” [Kitchener-area Liberal MP Karen] Redman said in question period. “Segregation cannot be confused with treatment.

“The government has ignored several reports calling for a mental health strategy in our prisons. When will the government take action and implement a mental health strategy in Canadian prisons?”

Not that I’ve got a mental health strategy for Canadian prisons up my sleeve, but I think it’s pretty obvious that forcing a suicidal girl, prisoner or no, to sleep on a concrete slab in solitary confinement isn’t going to turn her into a productive member of society.

Speaking of productive members of society, I am working normal hours again and will finally have time to regularly update this blog.